Born on October 25, 1792, both the French Revolution and the sea affected Jeanne Jugan from birth. Her father was a sailor as were many men who lived on the outskirts of Cancale off the north coast of Brittany. Jeanne never met her father as he never returned from his voyage to Newfoundland in April 1792. Instead, she would learn to cling to the love of her Heavenly Father.
Jeanne’s childhood was wrought with poverty and filled with prayer. With fathers and husbands gone for months at a time, Jeanne witnessed her mother and the other Cancale women pray. Despite the new French laws, these women faithfully walked to a humble chapel — the Chapel of the Sea, Our Lady of the Orchard.
Around fifteen or sixteen, Jeanne worked as a kitchen-maid at the house of La Mettrie-aux-Chouettes. There she learned the art of refinement from this wealthy family and regularly aided them in helping the poor. Being poor herself, Jeanne maintained both an understanding and a grace in being able to give to others.
As she grew up, a suitor made himself known to Jeanne. She asked him to wait for her, but instead after a couple years, she felt the call to celibacy. These formative years of waiting assisted Jeanne in answering God’s will.
Jeanne left her home at Les Petites Croix at the age of twenty-five. She left her best belongings to her sisters, embracing poverty in order to truly serve the poor of Saint-Servan.
France was riddled with beggars and poor families. The allied forces’ requisitions in 1815 and grain shortages in both 1816 and 1817 rendered many French destitute. In Saint-Servan, Jeanne reached the poor through her work at the Hospital of Le Rosais.
For six years, Jeanne worked at the hospital as a nurse learning about medicine. She further developed her call and joined the Third Order of the Heart of Mary.
Unfortunately, Jeanne herself became ill. This illness led her to live with and work for Mademoiselle Lecoq. This woman nursed Jeanne and their friendship blossomed. Together, they aided the poor and taught catechism to parish children.
Mademoiselle Lecoq died on June 27, 1835, leaving Jeanne once more to determine God’s call. She found herself living with Fanchon, a woman aged seventy-two. Later, a young woman named Virginie would join them at the tender age of seventeen. For four years, Jeanne’s calling would build inside her.
At the age of forty-seven, her new vocation officially began when she gave up her bed to a poor, elderly, and blind woman—Anne Chauvin. Not long after, Jeanne, Virginie, Marie Jamet —Virginie’s friend, and Madeleine Bourges—one of the three original women Jeanne nursed in their home, would create the beginning of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Jeanne’s little group of women grew as she lived among the poor, begged for them, and nursed them to health or journeyed with them to their final hours. She met her own death on August 29, 1879.
Pope Benedict XVI canonized St. Jeanne Jugan on October 11, 2009. Today, the Little Sisters of the Poor continue her mission and legacy as they assist the poor and sick throughout the world.
Paul Milcent’s work, Jeanne Jugan: Humble So As to Love More, beautifully summarizes Jeanne’s life and virtue and challenges us to do the same in our daily lives.
Milcent writes: “Attentive. Attentive to those around her, attentive to the life of the world, attentive to God so lovingly sought—but it was the same attentiveness, whether directed towards God or towards others, since ‘he dwells in them and they in him.’ She rested a prayerful gaze on each individual, attentive to the Poor Man. Jeanne Jugan’s silence was the silence of listening, of receiving, of loving attentiveness.”
